Daydreaming: An Essential Exercise for Writers

One of the main things I remember my school teachers complaining about in my report cards was that I spent too much time daydreaming. I guess they thought I should’ve been doing something more important like figuring out maths problems or some other such nonsense. I don’t know.

In any event, I found that as I got older, daydreaming came a lot less naturally. I don’t know if it’s because adult life puts too many demands on our time or if it’s because I had one too many report cards telling me to stop daydreaming, but for whatever reason, daydreaming is a habit I’ve had to make a conscious effort to get back into.

Yes boys and girls, you heard me right. Daydreaming is a habit you should definitely get back into, especially if you plan on being a story-writer. After all, stories begin in the imagination and the imagination is just like a muscle, which needs to be exercised on a regular basis to keep it strong. Fortunately, you don’t need to pump irons to keep this muscle strong. You need to daydream.

Now before I go any further, I just want to clarify exactly what I mean by daydreaming. I don’t mean staring vacantly into space. I mean tapping back into that wealth of creativity that as children we used in imaginative play which allowed us to spontaneously imagine ourselves to be anyone, anywhere, anytime doing anything. For children, it’s effortless (almost unavoidable in fact). The rest of us, alas, need to work at it.

Make Time For It

I don’t think my teachers objected to me daydreaming per se. I suspect their real problem was with whenI did it. It’s really not polite to daydream while someone is trying to teach you about something “important” like mathematics. Children don’t understand this, of course, and they just daydream whenever they feel like it. They also have buckets of time specifically set aside for imaginative play. As adults, however, we have constant demands on our time, none of which are imaginative play time: jobs, family, marriage, divorce, births, deaths, dishes, mortgages, cooking, driving, social events, hospital visits, court summons, insurance claims, driving, dating, washing, buying furniture, grocery shopping, taxes, hoovering and a myriad of other “important” things.

To be sure, some of these things are important. But if you want to tell stories of your own invention, you need imagination as active and as vibrant as that of a child. So be sure to set aside time in your busy schedule to daydream.

Be Proactive

True daydreaming, where the mind simply wanders into the realms of fantasy without stopping to plan, edit or revise, is not easy to do on demand. As adults, we tend to over-complicate things and so when we come to our daydreaming time, it’s easy for us to fall into the trap of sitting there simply thinking ‘Right, I must try and come up with some flight of fancy now. Let me think, what shall I dream about? Hmmm, no, that wouldn’t work. I’m thinking, thinking…. Gagh, I feel silly just sitting here doing nothing. This is hard. I can’t do it. I have no imagination. I’m a failure’. Worse still, we might end up just thinking about all the “more important” things we have to do.

So what’s the solution? Simple. Consider again what children do. They don’t just sit there daydreaming all day. They draw, they role play, sometimes they even write. In short, they express all that raw imagination soup in their head by giving it some kind of form. Why not try it yourself? Try free-writing, or buy yourself a cheap drawing pad to doodle in. Get some of your friends together for some imaginative role play. Play with finger puppets if you have to! Whatever it takes to really exercise that imagination.

Anything Goes

This isn’t writing. It isn’t even planning. It is simply exercising that part of your brain which spontaneously generates possibilities, however bizarre they might be. Therefore there is absolutely no need to edit. Plot holes, structure, and even plagiarism count for nothing in your daydreams.

Daydream about being Batman if you like. It’s not plagiarism if all you’re doing is fantasising, so allow yourself to wonder what it might be like driving a batmobile, fighting crime in Gotham’s seedy underbelly or changing your clothes while simultaneously sliding down a fireman’s pole. Try and put into words, if you can, how it feels to drive the batmobile. What does Gotham’s seedy underbelly smell like? Does that fireman’s pole chafe on the way down?

And what would happen if Batman encountered the villain from your story? How would Batman handle that? Yes, I know it’s silly. So what? Have fun with it. No one is going to edit, mark or even see your daydreams so let your imagination do whatever it wants. All that matters is that you imagine widely and imagine often, so that when you do come to work on creating proper works of fiction, you’ve got a strong enough imagination to do it.

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Until next time!

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